a pact or contract between the Government and the people
became the favourite assumption of political writers from the sixteenth
century onward, and it was this theory that Rousseau popularised in his
"Social Contract," the theory, too, which triumphed for a season in the
French Revolution.

The theory is, of course, pure assumption, without any basis in history,
and resting on no foundation of fact. It assumes that primitive man was
born with enlightened views on civil government, and that for the greater
well-being of his tribe or nation he deposited the sovereign authority
which belonged to himself, in a prince or king--or in some other form of
executive government--retaining the right to withdraw his allegiance from
the government if the authority is abused, and the contract which conferred
sovereignty violated. It was not maintained that the contract was an
actually written document; it was supposed to be a tacit agreement. The
whole theory seems to have sprung from the study of Roman law and the
constitutions of Athens and Sparta. Nothing was known of primitive man or
of the beginnings of civilisation till the nineteenth century. The Bible
and the classical literature of Greece and Rome are all concerned with
civilised, not primitive, man, and with slaves and "heathens" who are
accounted less than men. The "sovereign people" of Athens and Sparta became
the model of later republican writers, while the choosing of a king by the
Israelites recorded in the Old Testament sanctioned the idea, for early
Protestant writers, that sovereignty was originally in the people.

The Huguenot Languet, in his _Vindiciae contra Tyrannos_ (1579), maintained
on scriptural grounds that kingly power was derived from the will of the
people, and that the violation by the king of the mutual compact of king
and people to observe the laws absolved the people from all allegiance.[72]
The Jesuit writers, Bellarmine and Mariana, argued for the sovereignty of
the people as the basis of kingly rule; and when the English divines of the
Established Church were upholding the doctrine of the divine right of
kings, the Spanish Jesuit, Suarez, was amongst those who attacked that
doctrine, quoting a great body of legal opinion in support of the
contention that "the prince has that power of law giving which the people
have given him." Suarez, too, insists that all men are born equal, and that
"no one has a political jurisdiction over another." Milton, in